The Guardian's music blog, argues that Holden Caulfield inspired the modern idea of the rock'n'roll rebel.
From the piece...
It's often said that the character of Holden Caulfield invented the teenager. I'd argue that, in some sense, Caulfield also set the mould for our modern notion of the rock star – damaged, hyper-sensitive, infinitely cool, creative, hungry for sensation, an authentic voice in a world of phonies. Kurt Cobain, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, Richey Manic, Gerard Way are all Holden Caulfields in their own way. Even Thom Yorke, with his "lost child" shtick, on songs such as Street Spirit (Fade Out) – the thin-skinned loner wandering the streets at night, adrift in a sea of heartless modernity.
The power of The Catcher in the Rye is its ability to make the reader feel Holden Caulfield is speaking exclusively to them. This, of course, has its downsides, as it's sometimes used as lazy lyrical shorthand for outsider status by the kind of American pop-punks who, you suspect, haven't really read many other books. To be "like Holden Caulfield" is in fact a cliche of that genre, invoked to lend literary weight to what would otherwise be mere navel-gazing angst (see The Offspring's Get It Right).
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